Prologue: Abscission.

-blinding golden light razing and enveloping everything reducing everything to ash. It reaches closer, closer to me and everyone around me and then… Nothing.

"Well, that was one way to go." And it was. Of all ways I thought I'll bite the dust, fighting Scion for the salvation of humanity was not one of them. At least I can say I´d died fighting till the end, but it's not like I had much of a choice when they tell you, that is either fight or face the destruction of all the Earths spread in the multiverse.

'A good way to die', some idiotic battle junkie would say, 'battling the closest thing to a living god that' we had. There was just one issue with that:

I didn't want to die. I wanted to live. I wanted to experience everything that world had once again. I wanted to feel the rain once again, kiss someone and be kissed. Travel more, try to work less, and that someone finally…

It didn't matter anymore. I was dead, yay.

My regrets about my life choices don't matter anymore, because I didn't have a life anymore.

Not that it mattered anymore. It didn't. I was fine. Completely. Yep.

I completely accepted that fact, and honestly I didn't understand the big deal. It wasn't like I was burning in Hell anyway so… I was okay. Yep.

I was just floating around here. In pure blackness and nothingness. Possible forever.

(And maybe, maybe I was regretting the fact that I stopped going to church. I this was the atheist afterlife, then I should have reconsidered that particular life choice more harder than the others.)

I fought and then I died; and in the face of that I reached a conclusion that I´d wish I have made years before when I triggered and started doing my career as a cape.

Death is a funny sad thing.

No, really, it actually is. Everyone makes such a big deal about it, from worrying if they go Heaven or Hell, or debating if these things actually exist, to doing silly thing like praying, going to a confessionary to even doing the always classic 'daily good deed' and probably even counting about how many they do day-by-day . Everyone worries about death, and what comes after when in true one thing is creating about death, and specifically our deaths, yours and mine, and that is:

Death is quiet, and being dead is an existence in an eternal quiet void. Or at least my afterlife is like that. Just me, myself and I and my best friend The Void.

I kinda wondered at first if I was in a big empty void because I was a non-believer before, and I'll be stuck in this eternal nothingness for all eternity. I mean the tranquility that provided being the only being in an unending void was nice at first, everything was so peaceful, I included that I did not complain but then I learned another truth about my current state that should have been obvious before:

Death is really boring, because people suck but without them you're alone and with nothing to do.

I never thought I would miss the deadlines for the essays in university, or the part-time job I chose as a cover, but the thing I missed more was my job. I loved my job. Being a villain was the best. I mean it wasn't like I went out of my way to hurt people. I just liked the money, and the power. And now that I was deprived of those things I was craving them more than anything. Was this my punishment? That was kinda...anti-climatic. If they were going to punish me I kinda expecting more fire and brimstone more than… this. I guess that compared to biblical punishments it was kinda tame though no less fitting. Humans always don't pay attention to the things we have for a long time and we only miss them after we don't have them anymore. And I missed my powers. Fuck that was wrong, I missed everything.

I literally couldn't do anything, and there wasn't anything to do. I had no body, or presence only my existence itself prevailed in here, if you could understand that. I was like a ghost, I was able to see around me and sense myself' but nothing more. The only thing I learned was that I could "sleep". Which to be honest isn't even the correct term but an approximation. I called it that way because I close my metaphorical "eyes" and stop everything, I feel nothing, I see nothing, and for that short while I am "sleeping" you could say I'm basically nothing yet paradoxically I know that for that time I'm nothing. Kinda disturbing at the beginning but then it kinda became easier because when you have nothing to, and fading consciously in and out of existence becomes your main hobby. Well it was that, or just ponder my life choices, again, for the rest of eternity. Choice for me was clear then.

For who knows how many years/months/days/ I wondered if this was going to be my afterlife till the universe exploded, or the Apocalypse, or whatever other huge-ass cosmic event started. I questioned myself so many times what could have happened if I had taken different decisions, or life choices. Was this some sort of punishment for my life of don't giving a crap about anything and hedonism? Was this Hell? Or some sort of really empty limbo? I did to myself so many questions as many regrets

I didn't notice I had, and all of them were as useless as my ponderings.

I was dead, no fucking solution to that, and if it existed one I was pretty sure that philosophy and a deep look to my inner self weren't the ones.

All of that was pretty much my daily routine till one day/ week/ month/ year, I found out the most important thing about Death:

Death is many things but the most important one is that it seems to be temporal.

Turns out that of all the countless theories about what happens after, the one I didn't think it was going to happened actually happened.

But really could you blame me? When I heard first about reincarnation the guy that told me about it said that in my next life I'll reincarnate into a gecko of all things. I don't like geckos, especially their weird ass eyes and their creepy tongue which they use to lick their eyes. They're unsettling, and really gross and being told that I´ll be one in my next life made a tad bit unhappy at that crazy thinker.

Then it appeared.

A bright light appeared on the "horizon" of the void and kept growing and growing until it was blinding yet so paradoxical transfixing that I had to fight to separate my "eyes" out of it. It was beautiful and it brought back everything I missed with it too.

And for the first time since forever, I felt pain, and noise and life. And it was glorious.

And then I lived.

X-X-X-X-X

In this new life in I met my mother for exactly ten minutes.

I was a newborn baby so I'm surprised that I remember anything about the day I was born.

This doesn't mean I remember everything; after all I was a newborn. However I remembered enough to make a lasting impression of her and brand a few things to my memory with fire so they never fade away. These are the things I know of my mother:

1. Her name was Rouge. Later I learned that her surname was Portgas and she was married.

2. She had a beautiful mane of red hair, so bright and beautiful that while the memories of her face may fade away, her hair never will.

3. She loved my brother and me very, very much. So much that she sacrificed her life so we could be born.

4. She loved our father very, very much as well even when everyone told her that my father was a devil and that love would end up killing her. They were right at the end, but I don't think she regretted.

Everyone told me she was very special, kind and brave. A good person, and if she had survived to raise us she may have surely become a good parent. That was special for me, in a small way, because I've never had back in my previous life a parental figure worth mentioning.

It was important because I wasn't alone this time. I had a brother. His name is Ace. Someone else besides me depended on a strong authority figure, but sadly there wasn't one willing to pick up the sack. At least not one that could fit the term of proper authoritative figure .

I tried not to think of the life we could have had too much and I tried to encourage Ace as well to do so in order to avoid unnecessary sadness and melancholy. Not use crying over dead milk and choices beyond us. We needed to move forward because there was no choice but that. We didn't made it. Him, more than me. The reason?

They told us they we didn't deserve to be born.

Our father was apparently a pirate and an important one at that. He was known as the "King of the Pirates". The most dangerous pirate in all the seas, to be exact and in a world where practically all the lands where islands and the most powerful military force was the Navy and its marines, the pirates were the most immediate and persistent threat of all people existing in this new world I lived in. Ruthless, evil and behaving more akin to beasts than humans, it was no surprise that everyone with some sense hated the shit out of them. He gained all the riches in the world and spit in the World Government eyes so of course that after his capture and death, they would do its best to demonize him and brand him as the Devil.

And we as his son and daughter were Devils too as well and we deserved to die as well according to current government….

How ironic that our mother sacrificed her life to so we could live. We were supposed to be raised with love and a strong support system, I suppose and in the end we got… this. A shit of a life with a big obese woman that is a bandit of all things and can't do shit to care of us, a big and boisterous old man that only is around to beat us and throw us in horrible life or death situations including tigers, giant jungle anacondas and talking monkeys that only talk in rhyme. Did I mention that our house was shit and we shared it with smelly bandits and it only covered the most basic necessities by only a little shave? And let's not speak about other less necessary but still very important things: Education? Ha you wish. I lived with a woman who only touched books to burn them. Clothes that offer protection for the elements? Yeah right, only if we stole them. Prospects for the future? Only if 'bleak', and "stuck in a life of crime" counted as actual possibilities in my new reality.

In short, I was regretting that I didn't reborn as a fucking gecko. At least with that I didn't have to deal with my broody brother that wanted to be a pirate despite hating our father because he was one and for that reason, everybody would hate us if they knew that we existed. That if we were around by that time. I was still unsure of how our odds were just to get to puberty.

Our grandfather wasn't much better. His reason for beating us up? He wanted to makes us super strong Marines apparently and completely ignored the fact that both of us would never work for the World Government. Too blatantly corrupt for my tastes and that's is something and if that comes from a villain like me…

By that time ( with my brother choosing to be a pirate for the abstract reason of freedom of all fucking things, and my grandfather being useless for everything but fighting) I realized that I was the one that inherited the brains of the family. Now I just needed a way to use them in a way that would get me the hell out of here and everyone

The only upside of the situation of that for some reason my powers seemed to be back. I didn't know why and with not a single answer in hand and more questions that i could count I decided to just make the best with the tools I possessed.

I had powers, the smarts and the drive to do this. I would leave this shitty island in the middle of nowhere and become someone. I did it once, I'll do it again. I mean my previous world was one of superheroes, and monsters, with a living god to boot.

There was no way that this one was actually crazier than that.

Right?

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

END. Abscission